Friday! I am actually looking forward to this weekend. It is the beginning of the prep for thanksgiving. Today I will be making a list of all of the things I need to get ready to go. I won’t actually be making the pies to go with me until closer to the time we head out of town, but I need to get all my baking ducks in a row. Not that I am actually baking ducks. Apples mostly. But you get the idea. So shall we start this morning’s prompt? Timers set, ready, set, write…
Again. I really like the start of this and the main character but i will need to sit down and figure out where the story is going. Which I’m fine with but it seems to be the theme of the week. I do like my baker though.
Friday, November 18th: Flour coated the work surface.
Flour coated the work surface. Nia clicked her tongue as she turned out the next bowl of risen dough and began to separate the mass of it into small nodules. The law was clear on the size. Each type of bread had a specific size and weight to it that it needed to meet. All of the Merca rolls needed to be no smaller than three inches in diameter.
If the law hadn’t been so strict, Nia might be tempted to trim the rolls just a little in an effort to get a few more out of the batch.
“Which is why there is a law about the size,” she mused as she worked. Her hands worked without needing much thought. While she couldn’t count the number of Merca rolls she made in her time working in this bakery, today she had been up since well before dawn and already more than a hundred trays had been sent to the bake ovens.
Once the trays left her workroom however they were someone else’s business and she wished whoever was in charge of this baking the best of luck. She would supply as many of the balls of dough in the proper size as she could but there would be no extra.
Nia bit back a curse that she wanted to spew at whoever got the order wrong at the palace. The order they placed turned out to be less than half of what they needed for the feast and the mistake had only been caught the afternoon prior.
Extra supplies were brought in from wherever they could be found and Nia mixed everything into the dough, arranging the baskets in order so that they would each have the proper rise time. All of the other treats for the palace she passed off into other hands. She was the only one who could make the Merca rolls and so that is exactly what she did. By this point her fingers were beginning to cramp and her knees had cone numb. Nia’s physical position had changed little throughout the day. She leaned to the left. She leaned to the right. She leaned forward and on a few occasions took a few steps to wheel in the next large stand of baskets containing the needed dough.
Normally she loved her work in the bakery reveling in every aspect of it. This wasn’t a joy, it was an endurance trial and one she was determined to pass.
Nia finished dividing the dough into rough portions and then used her hands to cage two separate portions with her fingers. She rolled her hands around moving the dough, smoothing the rough balls into smoothly rounded shapes before setting them on the baking tray. She worked her way through the dough and placed the last of the rounded balls on the tray. As she did, the baker’s boy came in to pick up the tray from her and take it out to the ovens. By now their timing was in sync. Nia wondered if she looked as knackered as the boy did.
She leaned to the left to reach for the next bowl only to find none there. She turned expecting to need to wheel the next rack in, but found there was no rack waiting. Nia stared at the empty space. She blinked and tried to figure out where the waiting dough had gone.
Then realization finally sunk in. “Done.”
Ten til Midnight 